The effects of local homogeneity assumptions in metapopulation models of infectious disease

Abstract

Computational models of infectious disease can be broadly categorized into two types: individual-based (agent-based) or compartmental models. While there are clear conceptual distinctions between these methodologies, a fair comparison of the approaches is difficult to achieve. Here, we carry out such a comparison by building a set of compartmental metapopulation models from an agent-based representation of a real population. By adjusting the compartmental model to approximately match the dynamics of the agent-based model, we identify two key qualitative properties of the individual-based dynamics which are lost upon aggregation into metapopulations. These are (i) the local depletion of susce..